BarcelonaRight in front of the Odessa Opera House, built in 1810 in the rococo style, there is a square. On the left, cats are skewered down the steps of the city’s History Museum, right on the street dedicated to the city’s founder, Admiral Josep de Ribas, a Russian army soldier who was born in Barcelona. When the street reaches the square, on a corner, there is the list of Soviet soldiers who received war decorations. A memorial to the thousands of soldiers who died during the 1941 siege of the city, from August 8 to October 16. Still more civilians died in one of the harshest battles of the war.
Odessa, founded on the shore of the Black Sea, is a beautiful city. The Potemkin Stairs connect the city center with the sea. The stairs where Sergei Eisenstein shot one of the best-known scenes in the history of cinema, the one where the Tsar’s troops crush a demonstration demanding bread and freedoms; with a baby stroller falling down the stairs. The massacre happened, it’s true. But he was on the street above, not on the stairs. But Eisenstein understood that in that silent cinema the image of the stairs had more power. And until today, many people pilgrimage here to see the stairs; and sleep, if they can, in the hotel next door, the Londonskaya, where Eisenstein himself slept those days of filming in 1925. Walking through its corridors is getting excited about the history of this city. Chékhov, Mayakovski, Robert Louis Stevenson, Isadora Duncan, Mastroianni or Montserrat Caballé slept here. Odessa is a city of art, headed for a new siege. The first, that of 1941, was cruel.
Between 40,000 and 60,000 Soviets lost their lives in that siege, in the first months of Operation Redbeard, when the Nazis attacked the USSR accompanied by their allies. In fact, it was not the Nazis who besieged Odessa, it was the Romanians, who had entered through the border through the Bessarabian area. More than 93,000 soldiers of the Romanian Fourth Army, with the help of some platoons of the German Eleventh Army, needed half a year to conquer this port. The city received the title of “heroic” city of the USSR. Although it did not hold out as long as other cities where the siege lasted even longer, such as Sevastopol, in Crimea. Or Leningrad and Stalingrad, which resisted after more than a year with the enemy at the gates. These were the four cities that received this title, of heroic city, in the USSR. And the monuments are clearly visible, despite the 2015 law of the Ukrainian Parliament according to which all communist symbols have to be removed from the streets. With one exception: if they are related to World War II. Part of the defense was made underground, since the city was full of underground galleries, initially built to extract calcareous stone. It is estimated that there are more than 2,500 km of tunnels in the city, used in 1941 by Soviet defenders and in recent decades by organized crime, to enter objects that they do not want to declare, or to promote tourism.
The memories of that siege have passed from the mouths of the survivors until now. The Romanians were so punished after running into Soviet resistance that the generals in the service of the dictator Ion Antonescu recommended him to abandon that stupid adventure that was to accompany Hitler to the east. Antonescu, who had received the news of Hitler’s decision to attack the USSR before Mussolini, ignored them. And he headed Romania towards disaster. Antonescu was confident that the Germans would allow the Romanians to expand their borders with conquered land. In fact, the idea was that Odesa was part of Romania, a fact that Hitler offered in exchange for military support. Antonescu had come to power with a coup d’état in 1940, taking advantage of the fact that a good part of the population was very hurt after seeing how part of the territory that the Romanians aspired to claim as the seat of the area of present-day Moldova had ended up in Soviet hands after of years of litigation. Antonescu, with the support of the local fascist party, staged a coup and proclaimed himself leader. And he joined Hitler in what he defined as “a holy, anti-communist, just and national war.” And the war started off pretty well for them. In three weeks they had already taken Bessarabia and part of Bucovina, the lands that they felt had been lost in 1940. The second phase of that operation was to expand Romania into lands that had never been Romanian, creating a new province with its capital in Odessa. In Odessa, then, mainly Russian was spoken, as now, since it is still a city with a Russian-speaking majority. Odessa is known for having a dialectal variant of Russian, with influences from other languages such as Ukrainian, Greek, Romanian or Italian, which were very present in the city until World War II. Ukrainian is hardly the second language little spoken. And for years it was the third language, since the second was Yiddish, because the Jewish population was very large, with geniuses like the writer Isaak Babel. Little was spoken of Romanian. There were more Greeks than Romanians, in fact.
The Romanians thought that Odessa would fall easily. The Nazis, too. The first months of the offensive, the Soviets seemed unable to stop the rapid war of their enemies, the Blitzkrieg. But in Odessa, the Soviets prepared highly organized defensive lines. The first defensive line was on the outskirts of the city, protected by a mined area. Despite the fact that 30,000 soldiers had to defend themselves against a Romanian army of 160,000 men, the first attack failed. The second, too. And the third. In fact, Antonescu ended up firing the chief general, Ciuperca, outraged at the casualties of his men. In his place he put Lieutenant General Iosif Iacobici, who seemed to do better, but was believed stopped when the Soviets were able to send 10,000 relief soldiers by sea. To top it off, Antonescu wanted to visit the front with his trusted soldier, Brigadier General Alexandru Ioanitiu, but just as he landed, he died in a very strange accident: the plane’s propeller shattered it when it went down too fast, without the engine having started. off.
What the Romanians did not do, well, the Nazis did, when, on the other hand, they conquered Crimea, starting the siege of Sevastopol. Thus they cut off communication by sea with Crimea. And the Soviet authorities decreed to evacuate the maximum number of soldiers and civilians by sea, and bring them to the Russian coast. Moscow understood that Odessa could not be defended and the city fell on October 16. In 15 days in October, more than 86,000 military and 15,000 civilians had been evacuated, but more than 150,000 still remained in the city when the Romanians entered. Already on the first day of occupation the executions began, especially of Jews, gypsies and communists. More than 30,000 people would be executed. The vibrant Jewish community of more than 70,000 souls, the one that Babel had explained in books like the precious Story of my loft, He disappeared. Babel was also dead, then. Hitler had not killed him. In this case, Stalin had killed him in 1940, for being an opponent, despite the fact that he was a fervent communist who had recounted the harshness of the war in his famous The red cavalry.
Zhanna Berina was one of the survivors of the siege. And of the Holocaust, since she was Jewish. In 1989 she emigrated to the United States, where she participates in talks in schools explaining her life, to fight against fanaticism. “Part of my family died in the fire following the impact of a Nazi bomb on the building where explosives were stored. They spent months under artillery fire, with little food, living in underground tunnels for days on end. They only went outside when it rained or it was bad weather, because aviation had fewer options to bomb. When the Romanians and the Nazis entered, they locked us up in a ghetto”, he recalled. “But when a bomb blew up the Romanian general quarter, in retaliation they killed hundreds of civilians. On one street, Marazlievskaya, they took out all the residents and hung them from lampposts.” Berina would survive because the troops of Vlasov, a Russian general who had gone over to the Nazis, set fire to the barracks where the city’s Jews who could still work in factories had been, and left a door open through which he could escape.”
The war, always cruel, always persistent, knocks again at the doors of Odessa, a beautiful city that was designed as a great spa, open to the sea, to enjoy life. A city of opera, of culture, where Russian-speaking citizens are exposed to a siege by the Russian army. A city that already understood that the country was cracking when on May 2, 2014, those months in which Ukraine was divided between those who looked towards the European Union and those who wanted to remain close to Russia, more than 40 people lost their lives in the city. A pro-Russian demonstration ran into a pro-Ukrainian one. Some of them were fans of the local football club, Chornomorets, taking part in this second march, since it was match day. During the fight weapons appeared. Six people, all pro-Ukrainian, lost their lives. The pro-Russians, many of them elderly people, hid in the house of the unions, in the middle of Kulikovo park, near the railway station. The pro-Ukrainians began a shower of Molotov cocktails. And more than 40 people burned to death inside. That day, something began to break in the heart of Odessa. At the Londonskaya Hotel, where some cameras are named after the celebrities who spent the night, they took down a photograph of Russian film director Nikita Mijalkov, since he is a supporter of Putin.
Until recently, people still brought flowers to the union house building, to remember the dead, even if they did not share the ideas of those who died in it. They believed that Russians and Ukrainians would agree again, as so many times in the past of this cosmopolitan port. Now it’s time to defend the city. Again, death knocks at the door.
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